April Fool’s Day on one plate or the danger of trackbacks

With every passing year more and more websites participate in April Fool’s Day by publishing fake news, announcements, products, and press releases. There’s lots of fun on the Web on any given day, but twice so on the 1st of April. There are so many of these jokes floating around, that some people even collect them into long lists with embedded ads.

While reading through one of these lists, I came across this joke about WordPress and TextPattern merger. That was a funny one. But it wasn’t the joke that got me thinking, but rather the blog entry in itself. If you scroll down that entry, you’ll see all pingbacks and trackbacks from other sites than linked to it. Not everyone understood that it was a joke. Some people took it serioiusly. And now they look like fools (isn’t it how you’re supposed to look on 1st of April anyway?). Some of them had even deleted posts that provided the pingback, but from the pingback excerpt on WordPress site you can actually see if the joke was understood or not. Morale: if you made a fool out of yourself, and proved so with pingback/trackback – don’t make it worse by deleting the content. Internet forgets nothing.

Gladly, I didn’t spend enough time on the Web yesterday to leave the trail of my stupidity. But I did so last few years, and will definitely do so in the years to come. Somehow, April Fool’s Day always gets me by surprise.

What about you? Have you been fooled? Have you fooled anyone? What’s the best prank you’ve ever pulled?